Pragmatic language skills of students with language and/or learning disabilities: a quantitative synthesis

A meta-analytic review of 33 studies investigating the pragmatic language skills of 3- to 12-year-old students with language disorders, language-learning disabilities, or learning disabilities as compared with the pragmatic language skills of nondisabled peers was conducted. The students with language and/or learning disabilities demonstrated consistent and pervasive pragmatic deficits in conversation compared to non-disordered peers (mean effect size = -0.52; SE = 0.06) across settings, conversational partners, age groups, and types of pragmatic skills measured. The pragmatic differences between the students with language or learning disabilities and control groups could not be accounted for by differences in study methodology or design. Furthermore, these pragmatic deficits appeared to be more attributable to underlying language deficits than to insufficient social knowledge. These findings are consistent with the perspective that students with learning disabilities can also be described as language disordered, and that children with language disorders experience a continuum of language failure that may be manifested in different ways as they progress through school.